Stargate Hydrogen takes over the HySTAT alkaline electrolyser legacy from Cummins
A five-year-old Estonian electrolyser maker has been chosen by Cummins to manufacture and service replacement stacks for more than 400 HySTAT alkaline electrolysers across 65 countries. We look at what the agreement says about Stargate Hydrogen's maturity, why Cummins stepped back, and why this decades-old platform now lives on in Tallinn rather than fading away.
NEWS
PtXBaltic
10/19/20264 min read
Stargate Hydrogen didn't exist five years ago. This morning the Tallinn company announced it has signed with Cummins to become the approved aftermarket vendor for the whole HySTAT alkaline stack business. More than 400 installed systems. Over 1,000 stacks. 65 countries. And they're already assembling stacks in Tallinn. That's a lot of responsibility to hand to a company founded in 2021.
One of the world's largest alkaline fleets now answers to Tallinn
Think about who actually runs a HySTAT. Industrial gas companies, refineries, a few labs and power plants. These are people who treat hydrogen production as plumbing, not as a project. They don't want a roadmap. When a stack gets tired they want a replacement that fits the skid they already have, built to the spec they already have, delivered when they were told it would be. From now on that call goes to Tallinn.
Stargate will make and supply the replacement stacks and whatever service goes with them. The company says this widens its customer list by a long way and puts it in front of global industrial gas operators it couldn't have reached on its own. Marko Virkebau, the CEO, called the deal "first and foremost about maturity", which we think is the right word. Tim Proctor at Accelera by Cummins said they picked Stargate for its technical expertise, commitment and long-term perspective. You don't write that sentence about a company you're offloading a problem onto.
Five years, one factory, and now a global fleet
Stargate's run to this point has been quick, and unusually concrete for a European electrolyser maker. Marko Virkebau and Rainer Küngas founded it in Tallinn in 2021 around a precious-metal-free alkaline stack with a ceramic catalyst, later validated at ZSW in Stuttgart. 2025 was the year it stopped being a lab story: an €11 million Series A, a factory in Tallinn with a reported 140 MW a year of capacity, and Repsol's venture arm coming in as a minority shareholder. In December its 1 MW system made first hydrogen at Fortum's Kalla test centre in Loviisa, sitting next to a Hystar PEM unit, which makes Kalla one of the few places in the Nordics where you can watch alkaline and PEM run side by side.
2026 kept adding. A cooperation with VTT. A country director for Finland. A partnership with Hydrogenera on industrial projects across Europe. Then in September a €20.6 million Innovation Fund grant to push the Tallinn plant to 250 MW of electrodes, 150 MW of stacks and 66 MW of systems a year. Customers on the list now: Fortum, Utilitas, ABB, Rockfin, with deliveries across Europe, Turkey and India. Put the HySTAT deal at the end of that list and it stops looking surprising. Cummins needed someone with a working factory, real alkaline know-how and enough money behind them to still be around in ten years. There aren't many of those in Europe.
Why Cummins stepped back from electrolysers
This is also a story about a retreat. Cummins bought into hydrogen in 2019 when it acquired Hydrogenics, the Canadian-Belgian company behind both the HySTAT alkaline line and the HyLYZER PEM line, and later tucked both into its Accelera zero-emissions unit. Then 2025 went badly. Cummins' own filings show it wrote off all the electrolyser goodwill and a chunk of inventory in the third quarter, and booked $458 million of electrolyser charges for the full year. In February 2026 it said it would stop new commercial electrolyser activity but honour existing commitments. In March it sold the low-pressure fuel cell business too.
Cummins' reasons were the usual ones: weaker demand, offtake that kept slipping, less policy support, mostly in the US. We'd add one thing. The same company is posting record numbers from diesel back-up generators for data centres. When reliability pays better than transition, that's where the money goes. The HySTAT deal is Cummins making sure the customers it's leaving behind don't get left behind.
A platform that predates the hydrogen hype by decades
HySTAT isn't a 2020s product. The alkaline line runs back through Hydrogenics' plant in Oevel, Belgium, to Stuart Energy, which Hydrogenics bought in 2004, and by Hydrogenics' own account to a Canadian electrolyser business going back to 1948. That's why the fleet is so big and so scattered: these units were being sold to industrial gas companies and labs long before anyone put "green" in front of hydrogen. Stargate talks about millions of combined operating hours in real industrial conditions, and for once that's probably not an exaggeration.
That history is worth something to Baltic hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders reading this. Alkaline was never the glamorous technology. It was the one that kept running. By taking on HySTAT, Stargate isn't just picking up customers. It's picking up the operating data, the failure modes, the service habits of a fleet that old. Its own STARDUST stack is still young. You can't buy that kind of education; you have to inherit it.
The legacy stays in Europe instead of fading out
Picture the other version of this. Big OEM leaves. Spare stacks for an old platform get harder to find. Operators turn to third-party rebuilders, or just don't bother, and a 400-unit fleet quietly retires early. Europe would have lost a chunk of working alkaline capacity right when it's trying to add some.
Instead, manufacturing moves from Belgium to Estonia and stays EU-made. Stargate's HySTAT product page leans hard on exactly that: EU-made, documented, with full integration support. And the Innovation Fund grant, which the Commission tied explicitly to supplying Power-to-X projects with EU-made equipment and cutting reliance on imported critical raw materials, now also props up a European aftermarket for one of the oldest platforms in the industry. Not a huge thing. But a real one, and it got decided in Tallinn rather than Brussels.
What recurring stack demand does for a young OEM
One more point, because it hides behind the headline. New electrolyser orders are lumpy, and right now they're scarce. Replacement stacks for an installed fleet aren't. They come in steadily, tied to operating hours rather than to the next subsidy window. Stargate says as much itself: recurring demand, a stronger footing in established markets, and a door into those customers for its own technology later.
For an electrolyser OEM in 2026 that's a sensible hedge. The companies that come out of this cycle will be the ones with proprietary tech, a factory, and cash that shows up every month. Stargate had the first two. This gives it the third. None of it is guaranteed. The fleet is old, the customers are demanding, and the Belgium-to-Estonia handover will be judged on the first few deliveries, not on the press release. But the shape of the deal is right.
Source: Stargate Hydrogen selected to continue the Legacy of the HySTAT Alkaline Electrolysers